


The Golden Cyberman

by impossiblewolfgirl



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, death in heaven, doctor who season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2614067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossiblewolfgirl/pseuds/impossiblewolfgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor went back to the day that the dead rose and became cybermen. But when he gets to the graveyard, he finds that returning might not have been such a good idea. Sometimes the dead are best left undisturbed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This is my first work on here, so that's exciting. Here's the first part, and I'll be updating soon. Leave reviews if you like and tell me what you think!  
> Disclaimer-y stuff: I don't own any of the characters, all that jazz.

The rain pelted to the ground. It appeared to be normal rain, but it rose up from the sewers and burrowed its way deep into the ground at a speed that would have been impossible, had it been regular precipitation.

The graveyards were mostly empty, but only because no one had any desire to be out in a graveyard in the rain. The precautionary newscasts had yet to go out.  
And in an off-centered graveyard behind a small church in Cardiff, the Doctor appeared. It was risky to be in the same time so close to his past self, but he hadn’t run into himself, and he had no intention of leaving the graveyard. Only a burning urge to learn more about the resurrected cybermen. The issue had kept him up night after night, and his chalk board was filled with hurriedly scrawled notes on how the transformation had been brought about.

Re-animating the dead was very, very difficult. It was possible on only seven planets, and banned in five of those. Punishable by death and re-death, in the resurrected’s case.  
The Doctor crossed the graveyard, stepping carefully through the soaked grass. He had his sonic screwdriver at the ready and a little vial in his pocket, which he pulled out and held up until several drops found their way into it. Then he capped it and slid it back into the pocket.

Any moment, the cybermen would awake. They would pull themselves up from the ground and be birthed into the world: metal children coming out of wood coffin eggshells.  
He watched as the first of the cybermen struggled their way to the surface. The ground buckled upwards then split, and they dragged themselves out spewing an array of confused syllables that contained no meaning. They stood and chunks of dirt tumbled from their joints. They were washed clean in the last of the rain, and then they simply stood there.  
The Doctor wove his way through the groups of cybermen with his sonic. He scanned each one he passed, and the sonic registered each one: vitals, energy output and signals, brain function. They looked like the cybermen he knew, but the cybermen he knew were constantly evolving.

He was on the ninth cyberman when something new caught the corner of his eye.

Something gold, and a little out of place.

The Doctor turned and dodged an oncoming cyberman who was starting to wake up enough that it could wheeze his name in slow motion. They were not alert enough to pose any threat.

He crossed the graveyard, dodging past a particularly soggy puddle, and stopped in front of the flash of gold, which was, in fact, a cyberman. Exactly the same as each of its dazed compatriots, except it had defied the common trend of silver.

“That’s definitely new.” The Doctor turned the sonic screwdriver on the cyberman. What could it be? A controller of some sort? Lead cyberman? King of the cybermen? He tossed each title around in his head, too distracted for the moment to hear the first word that it uttered.

“Doc-tor.” 

Perhaps King of the Cybermen. That seemed fitting of the gold color.

“Doc-tor.” This time, the voice drew his attention. And the bead of liquid that slipped out of the corner of its eye reeled him in(it was not rain, for the rain had stopped. The pollen was spread, and there was no more need of it). 

He stared at it in confusion. The cybermen knew who he was. But did this one know him? It seemed unlikely. And yet, there was a second tear following the tracks of the first. And he suddenly felt uneasy.

“Doc-tor.” The cyberman reached up with one large hand and pulled off its face plate.

“No, wait! Stop!”

He couldn’t look. Couldn’t see who was behind that mask.

The cyberman did not wait. Its fingers slipped and the face plate hit the ground with a dull thud.

“Doctor.”

The voice was more human now that it was not enveloped in metal.

He knew that voice.

He looked up and everything ran in slow motion.

She stared at him, her eyes shadowed by the blue of death. Bolts were driven down into her skin and pulled the skin back in ugly ridges. She was terribly pale.

Horror wrapped an ice-cold fist around his throat and squeezed tightly. He was speechless as he stared.

“Doctor.” She whispered.

They stood there in silence and stared at each other as the rest of the cybermen milled around. They were finding their voices. Linking into the hive mind. Completely oblivious to the pair standing in the middle of them.

“You’re not possible.” He finally said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cyberman is revealed.

She raised a hand to wipe away some of the tears, but the metal fingers were too clumsy to be of much help.

He was so shocked that at first it was impossible to pull forth the reasoning of why the cyberman was impossible forth from his mind. “Rose Tyler is in a different universe, did you think you could fool me like this?”

She made no sound to contest him, only searched his face with a look of desperation in her eyes. Her tears had turned into gasping sobs, but the cold metal did not need breath and cut her short.

“I’m sorry, Doctor.”

“You wouldn’t even know who I was! I’ve regenerated, I’ve changed!”

The shadow of a smile crossed her face. “TARDIS, screwdriver, here in the middle of a crisis. How could I not know?”

“No.” He spat.

The direction of Rose’s eyes shifted, and he turned. Missy was standing behind them with her hands clasped over her heart. It was hard to say how long she had been there.

“Well, isn’t this just precious? Look at you Doctor, reuniting with one of your precious Earth girl exes.” She sashayed around two gravestones and over to them. She surveyed Rose with a calculating look. “Although Earth girl might not be the best way to describe her. Look what traveling with you did to the poor girl. Tsk, tsk, Doctor.” She stood next to Rose and draped a hand around her shoulder.

“What we girls have to put up with for him, eh? It’s really not fair.”

“This isn’t Rose.” The Doctor insisted. “I’m not stupid. She’s safe.”

Missy’s mouth pulled down into a dramatic frown and she looked back and forth between Rose and the Doctor.

“I don’t know if you noticed, Doctor.” She stage-whispered. “This is her. She came back.”

“I sent her back home.”

“Hmm… the thing is, she followed you back. Again. Isn’t that right, Rose?”

Rose’s mouth was pressed into a tight line. She looked away from the Doctor, then back at him.

“I couldn’t just leave you. I had the dimension cannon rebuilt, and then there was an accident, and I had to. There was nothing left there for me.”

The Doctor stared back at her. All those years that he had comforted himself with the thought that Rose Tyler was back on Pete’s World and happy—a lie.

“It’s so cute how devoted your companions are. I think I do deserve some credit in this one, though. If not for me, she’d never have risen. She’d still be in the ground right now. That Bad Wolf stuff though, that is potent. Look at her—almost living. And gold. And herself. Maybe I can market that, what do you think? Feeling overly dead? Half your face rotting off? Buy Bad Wolf energy, and stand out in a crowd!”

“But what happened?” The Doctor whispered. What had caused her death? What was the accident in Pete’s World? He didn’t care about Missy and her ramblings. He would deal with her later that day. And Missy was growing bored.

“Much as I’d like to stay and listen to this wonderful discussion, I’d best be off. The world to conquer. Ooh, Doctor. Tell me. How does this day end? I’m ever so impatient.”

He brushed Missy off. She pouted for a minute, and then pressed a button on her bracelet and disappeared. He should feel guilty, because her death was on his hands. But if it really was Rose, and everything had not been a clever trap, then he did not care about anything else.

“What happened?” He repeated. The Rose Tyler in front of him was so different from the one he knew. The one he knew would have stood up to Missy when she went on talking. She would have… been different. Somehow.

“It’s okay. It was good to be home and all that stuff. I found Mickey and Martha, and they were really lovely. Really. We did some stuff together. Me ‘n my old friends, we caught up. I did a lot of stuff I couldn’t’ve done back there.” Rose said. She had pulled her tears together. She tried to brush away a strand of hair that had been plucked up by the breeze and thrown into her face, but the fingers of the cyber suit were clumsy and uncooperative. He almost reached up to help her, then decided against it. He was a different man. An old man that looked like an old man, and that changed relationships. He and Clara had struggled with that for a long time.

“But you died.”

“Everyone dies, Doctor. S’pose it was just my time to go.” She shrugged. The movement was completely out-of-place when done in the cyber suit.

She was not old. There were small wrinkles starting to form in the corners of her mouth and eyes, but humans would barely notice. There was no grey in her hair. It had not been her time, because her time was decades in the future, surrounded by children and grandchildren that had hints of his past regeneration laced through their features.

“It doesn’t matter.” Rose must have read the confusion in his eyes, and she rejected it. “I need you to—to do something. I don’t want to be like this, Doctor. I can’t feel anything. I’ve got the, ah, the emotional inhibitor thing, but it’s not working. Compliments of Bad Wolf, I suppose.”

“No.” He couldn’t turn Rose Tyler into a complete cyberman. That would be the perversion of one of the few things that he had always believed in, the deepest defilement. Rose Tyler thrived on her emotions. He could not take those away from her.

“I don’t mean it like that. I want you to—to get rid of me. Stop me. The TARDIS has to have something.” Her eyes pleaded him to help her. He was still shaking his head.

The Doctor had been selfish before. He had done things he was not proud of. Putting Rose, and every one of his companions, for that matter, in danger was one of the largest selfish things he could have done.

He had just ascended to a new level.

And Rose would never forgive him, he suspected. If he couldn’t find a way to fix her, that was. And he was ready to do whatever it took.

“I can help you. We can get you out of there, it’s just a suit.”

“I’m dead, Doctor.” Her dark eyes were proof of that. Whatever restoratives the Bad Wolf energy possessed had done their best, but the pallor of her skin and those shadows would never have been seen on a living person. “Just do it, it’s okay. I want this. I’m sorry, I know it’ll be hard for you, but please. For me.”

“No. No, I know someone, they can help you.”

Around them, the cybermen were growing more animated. They were all successfully linked into the hive mind, and their orders were beginning to flow in. He was running out of time. Soon they would start targeting him.

“Please.” Rose repeated. She bit the tip of her tongue and looked up at the thick clouds above. “Please, Doctor. Don’t drag it out.”

Selfish. So selfish. He twisted to check on the cybermen around them. There was not time to argue with her. But he could lie.

“I can’t do anything here. C’mon, the TARDIS has something for that.”

She knew that he was lying as well as he did, and he could read that in her eyes. But she was going to go along with their little charade for the moment. Because he asked. Because she didn’t have another option. And he hated himself for that.


End file.
